"Scientist Michael Mann, whose work on climate change led to contentious litigation over access to his emails, filed a libel lawsuit yesterday against National Review, accusing the conservative publication of defaming him by accusing him of academic fraud.

In the complaint (PDF) filed in District of Columbia Superior Court, Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, claimed that a July 15 article not only falsely accused him of misconduct, but crossed a line by comparing him to Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football assistant coach convicted of child molestation. He also sued the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that ran a piece about Mann on its staff blog, OpenMarket.org.

Mann was one of the researchers behind the now-famous "hockey stick" graph showing a jump in global temperature at the end of the last millennium. He was a professor at the University of Virginia from 1999 to 2005, and became the subject of litigation when the Virginia attorney general's office launched an investigation into his use of government grant money. Mann and his supporters charged that the investigation was part of a politically motivated effort to discredit climate change science."